Did you watch the classic 1980 horror film “The Shining” and think it was about a man driven to insane and murderous rage by a haunted hotel? If so, you blew it. Or rather, you missed profound messages subtly embedded in the film by its enigmatic director, Stanley Kubrick.

That, at least, is the notion behind “Room 237,” a documentary by Rodney Ascher released on Friday. The movie is a series of voice-overs atop scenes from Kubrick movies by a small assortment of obsessives who have developed baroque theories about the true meaning of “The Shining.” One believes the film is about the slaughter of American Indians, another that it is about the Holocaust. Yet another claims it is a kind of apology by Kubrick for the putative role he played in helping to fake the moon landing. And there’s more.

The documentary could be construed as a sly tribute to “The Shining” as measured by the startling variety of fanciful postulations and close viewings it has inspired. But the theories are presented with such a surprising lack of irony that it seems as though “Room 237” — the name refers to the scariest suite in the Kubrick movie’s snowbound Overlook Hotel — just might want its audience to take them seriously.

That makes the theories fair game for a sober assessment. And who better to provide one than Leon Vitali, who is listed in the closing credits of “The Shining” as personal assistant to the director? Mr. Vitali had an acting role in Kubrick’s 1975 movie “Barry Lyndon,” went to work for him soon after and remained on his payroll for decades. Mr. Vitali’s first task as an assistant was to fly to the United States to cast the role of Danny, the child of Jack (Jack Nicholson) and Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall). He was present during the 13-month filming at sound stages near London, and throughout postproduction.

Mr. Vitali, 64, is a Briton who now lives in Los Angeles, where he works on his own and other film projects. He was recently sent an advance copy of “Room 237,” and not surprisingly it elicited a strong response.

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A poster for the documentary “Room 237,” in which the moon-landing reference is proposed.

“I was falling about laughing most of the time,” he said by telephone. “There are ideas espoused in the movie that I know to be total balderdash.”

Take, for instance, the scene near the end of “The Shining” in which Jack Torrance is about to chop down a door as he chases his wife and child with an ax. The character recites a few lines of the “Three Little Pigs” story. “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in,” Jack huffs, mugging and grinning in pure derangement. “Not by the hair on your chinny chin chin.”

In “Room 237,” Geoffrey Cocks, a professor of history at Albion College in Michigan and author of “The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust,” writes that Disney’s original animated version of “Three Little Pigs” featured an anti-Semitic caricature, a wolf dressed as a Jewish peddler. He ties that in with several supposed references to the Holocaust to suggest that Kubrick wanted to link the fictional horror in “The Shining” with the real-world horror of the Nazi concentration camps.

That reading implies that Kubrick planned to use “Three Little Pigs.” But according to Mr. Vitali, when the scene was being filmed Kubrick brainstormed with him and Mr. Nicholson what Jack Torrance ought to howl before swinging his ax.

“Stanley thought the scene needed something, a few lines for Jack that would make him sound threatening and nasty,” Mr. Vitali recalled, but lines that could, in another context, sound soothing. “Three Little Pigs” was proposed, but nobody was quite sure about the words. So Kubrick called the mother of Danny Lloyd, the child actor who’d won the role of Danny Torrance.

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Leon VitaliCreditStephen Shugerman/Getty Images

“She was staying in an apartment nearby and she had the words to ‘Three Little Pigs’ right there,” Mr. Vitali said.

Mr. Vitali also cautioned against the suggestion that there might be Holocaust overtones to the German-made Adler typewriter that Jack uses to tap out his mad loop of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

“That was Stanley’s typewriter,” he said. “A lot of decisions made on the set were about pragmatism: ‘This looks good. It sits on the oak table pretty perfectly.’ Not to mention, it’s a great typewriter. I used that typewriter for 10 years, actually.”

Kubrick, who died in 1999, was legendary for his perfectionism, but he also believed in improvisation. What looks to many of the Shinologists in “Room 237” like the result of careful planning is often mere happenstance.

There are scenes, for instance, in which Danny wears a sweater showing the Apollo 11 rocket. This becomes part of the faked-moon-landing theory, as articulated by Jay Weidner, an author and independent filmmaker.

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Jack Nicholson in "The Shining."CreditWarner Brothers

“That was knitted by a friend of Milena Canonero,” the costume designer, Mr. Vitali said. “Stanley wanted something that looked handmade, and Milena arrived on the set one day and said, ‘How about this?’ It was just the sort of thing that a kid that age would have liked.”

Likewise, the cans of Calumet baking powder seen in the Overlook pantry were chosen not because they featured an American Indian in headdress, thus highlighting Kubrick’s interest in the plight of the American Indian, but because they had bright, bold colors.

“Part of what I did during that trip to the U.S. in 1975 was shoot larders in hotels,” said Mr. Vitali, using the British word for pantries. “It was so that Stanley” — who was American born but had lived in England for years by then — “knew what one was likely to see there. And I found Calumet cans all over the place.”

Yet another contention is that a poster in the Overlook shows a Minotaur, suggesting that the movie is a retelling of the Greek myth about the part man, part bull.

“That astonished me,” Mr. Vitali said. “I stood staring at all that stuff for weeks while we were shooting in that room. It’s a downhill skier. It’s a downhill skier. It’s not a Minotaur.”

Mr. Vitali said he never spoke with Kubrick about any larger meaning in “The Shining.” “He didn’t tell an audience what to think or how to think,” he said, “and if everyone came out thinking something differently that was fine with him. That said, I’m certain that he wouldn’t have wanted to listen to about 70, or maybe 80 percent” of “Room 237.”

Why not?

“Because it’s pure gibberish.”

Correction:March 27, 2013

An earlier version of this article contained a Web summary that misspelled the surname of Stanley Kubrick’s longtime assistant. He is Leon Vitali, not Vitale.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR13 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s Back. But What Does It Mean?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe